Question

3. Why the Indus Valley Civilization is also called the Harappan Civilization?

Answer 1

Explanation:

The Harappan civilization takes its name from Harappa, the archeological site where the first evidence of a new Bronze Age urban culture was unearthed. The term Harappa is simply the Urdu name for the location. What the people who lived there called the place is unknown because their language is as yet undeciphered.

This situation isn’t unique. There are many ancient cultures that have been the object of scientific study which go by names which are essentially arbitrary conventions. For example, the famous Minoan civilization was given its name by Sir Arthur Evans, the archeologist who first described the “palace complex” at Knossos. (I put the term in quotes because no one is sure what the Knossos remains really represent other than it must have been important to the Minoans.) Evans took the name from King Minos, a figure from Greek mythology and literature who was allegedly the ruler of Crete long before the time of the Trojan War. What the so-called Minoans called themselves is a mystery because their language, Linear A, is yet mysterious. (Linear B, the other script discovered by Evans turned out to be archaic Greek, and none of the examples found so far contains a generic name for the region or people other than Crete.)

Sometimes the remains of a prehistoric culture are so sparse that the only way the define its uniqueness from its antecedents and descendants is some distinctive artifact (when cultures that remote in time are discussed it is inappropriate to use the term civilization) which can be identified from many widely separated sites. A good example of this is the Beaker Culture of prehistoric Europe (late Neolithic to early Bronze Age). Examples of that culture have been discovered from Syracuse in the south to northern Scotland and from Budapest in the East to as far wast as Cape Roca in Portugal. No one believes there was a “beaker people” with one language and a united culture, not in the same sense there was a Mycenean people, however, the various tribes and clans of Neolithic Europe had enough interrelatedness that they shared a form and style of pottery, but evidently little else. We see the same thing in North America in the so-called Folsom Tradition of the Paleoindian era, which is a distinctive type of flint knapping. It was first described from a site in Folsom, Arizona, but examples can be found all over the continent south of the arctic regions. The Beaker Culture and the Folsom Tradition are just examples of the human propensity to copy successful ideas, and it is important not to read too much into names given to things by archeologists

Answer 2

Indus Valley Civilization which is also referred as Harappan civilization is of the largest cities of its time.This civilization was discovered in 1920 - 22 with the excavation of two of its most important sites i.e , Harappa on the banks of the river Ravi and Mohenjodaro on the banks of the Indus. The Indus Valley civilization is called the Harappan civilization because Harappa was the first site where the unique archaeological evidences of the civilization were discovered.